The middle row
service centre, footscray
lanes open. 08:30.
assisted: 0. priority: 0. self-service: 0.
chairs: 24 (was 36).There used to be three rows.
Plastic at the front for assisted. Leather at the back for priority. In between, twelve of the ordinary kind, padded seat, metal frame, for everyone else. In March a van came and took the middle row away, and two kiosks went in where it had been, and nobody sent an email about it. You could still see the marks in the carpet. Twelve sets of four little dents, in a line.
Joss had worked the assisted lane for six years and she wanted to know where the chairs went.
"Storeroom," said Ray.
"I've been in the storeroom."
"The other storeroom."
"There's one storeroom, Ray."
"There's the one you know about."
Ray had the priority lane, which came with a leather chair of his own and nine customers a day and a great deal of time to think about storerooms.
"Why would they keep them?"
"In case."
"In case of what?"
"In case they need a middle row."
"Then why take it out?"
"Because they didn't need it." He turned a page of something. "Today."
The first ding of the day was not for either of them. It was the kiosk. A woman stood at it with a folder under her arm, a work lanyard turned round so the name faced in, and she was reading the screen the way you read a thing for the third time, hoping it has changed.
It had not changed. She pressed something. The kiosk printed her a ticket. She looked at the ticket, then at the room, then at the place where a chair would have been, and then she came to Joss's counter, because Joss's counter was nearest.
"It says see a person."
"Can I have the ticket?"
Joss scanned it. The record came up.
citizen 3,418,207
age: 46. district: Naarm, west. code: AU-1. reach: 340
matter: carer support (parent)
lane: self-service"You're not in my lane," Joss said.
"The machine says see a person."
"The machine's right. You're just not in my lane."
"Then whose lane am I in?"
Joss looked at the kiosk. The woman looked at the kiosk. The kiosk looked at nobody.
"I've done it three times," the woman said. "Three times this week. It asks me the questions. I answer the questions. It says your matter needs a person. Then it prints me a ticket for here."
"That's right."
"And here says the kiosk."
"That's also right."
"They can't both be right."
"They're both right," said Ray, from the back, not looking up. "That's the thing about it."
The woman turned round to look at him. She looked at the leather chairs. She looked at the plastic ones. She shifted the folder to the other arm, because she had been holding it a while and there was nowhere to put it down.
"What's he?"
"Priority."
"How do I get to priority?"
"Three hundred and ninety a month," Ray said. "First month half."
"I'm here about a hundred and ten a week for my mum. I'm not paying three-ninety a month to ask."
"Most people aren't."
"Most people standing there," Joss said, before she could stop it, and Ray looked up for the first time.
The woman's name was Kerry. It was on the record and Joss did not use it. Names were for the lanes. Kerry opened the folder on the counter. It was the paper kind. Everything in it was in order, in plastic sleeves, with sticky tabs. Joss had seen a lot of folders. This was a good one.
"The flat got sold in March," Kerry said. "Mum had her fall in May. I took a smaller place so she could have the room with the window. I asked work for Fridays off in July so I could do her appointments, and they said no. So I do her appointments on my lunch and I do the work at night, all five days. I am not complaining."
"No."
"I'm telling you so it's on there."
"It's on there."
"Everyone was very nice," Kerry said. "The agent was nice. The hospital was nice. Work was nice. Every one of them did exactly what they were supposed to do. I have it all in writing. I checked." She put her hand flat on the folder. "Nobody did anything wrong. I just keep ending up standing here."
"There's no chairs," said Ray.
"I noticed."
"There used to be."
"Ray," Joss said.
"I'm only saying."
Kerry looked at the dents in the carpet. She looked at them for long enough that Joss thought she was going to ask, and then she did not ask, and Joss wrote that down in the part of her head where she kept the people who did not ask.
"I've paid in since I was nineteen," Kerry said.
"Everyone at that kiosk says that."
"Does that help?"
"No."
"Then why tell me?"
"So you know it's not just you."
"That doesn't help either."
"No," Joss said. "Sorry."
She meant it. She also had a count, and the count was why she was saying any of it. Since March she had kept it on a sticky note under her keyboard. Every middle file that came to her counter, and what it did next. Most went back to the kiosk. Some went home. A few paid Ray. Nobody had ever come back in the same lane. She did not know yet what the count was for. She only knew that a row of chairs had gone somewhere, and that people were going somewhere too, and that if she watched long enough she would find out if it was the same place.
"What's the line?" Kerry said.
"What line?"
"For your lane. There's a number. I'm over it. How far over?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Is it on your screen?"
"It's on my screen."
Joss did not turn the screen round. That would be a thing. She sat back in her chair to stretch, the way she did twenty times a day, and her elbow caught the edge of the monitor, and the monitor turned two degrees on its stand, which it did sometimes, and she did not turn it back.
Kerry read it. Joss watched her read it. It took about four seconds.
assisted threshold: 2,140 / wk
declared: 2,251 / wk
over by: 111"A hundred and eleven," Kerry said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't."
Kerry took a pen out of the folder. The form had a box for hours, and in the box, in her own neat hand, it said five days. She looked at it. Then she crossed out the five and wrote a four next to it, and initialled it, and turned the form round so it faced Joss, the way you turn a thing round when you want the other person to have done it.
"You'll lose more than you get," said Ray. He had stood up. He did not usually stand up.
"I know how to count."
"A day's pay is more than a hundred and eleven."
"I said I know how to count."
"Then why?"
Kerry did not answer him. She looked at Joss.
Joss looked at the form. There was nothing wrong with it. A citizen could declare her hours. A citizen could change them. The box was there for exactly that. Every part of it was working the way it was supposed to.
She typed the four.
declared: 1,800 / wk
lane: assistedThe screen went the warm colour it went for assisted. A new ticket printed. Joss tore it off and held it out, and Kerry took it, and for a second they both had hold of it.
"Have a seat," Joss said. "Someone will be with you."
"You're with me."
"Someone will be with you in the assisted lane. That's me. It's still a different queue."
Kerry put the folder under her arm. She turned round and walked to the front row, the plastic row, and she sat down in the middle of it, and Joss watched her shoulders come down about two centimetres, the way they do when somebody has been standing up for longer than they knew.
Ray sat back down in his leather chair. He did not turn the page.
"That's not where they went," he said.
"Where what went?"
"The chairs."
"I know it's not where the chairs went."
"I'm just saying. It's not the same thing."
"I know."
Joss peeled the sticky note off from under her keyboard. Under the long column of kiosks and homes and Rays, she wrote a small new heading, and under it a one, and the time. Then she stuck it back down where it lived.
The kiosk dinged.
A man stood at it with a takeaway coffee in one hand, an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear, reading the screen the way you read a thing the first time. He pressed something. The kiosk printed him a ticket. He looked at the ticket and then around the room for somewhere to sit, and found the dents in the carpet, twelve sets of four, and looked at them for a while.
"It says see a person," he said, to nobody in particular.
Nobody in particular answered. He stood on the bare strip between the plastic and the leather, and drank his coffee, and waited, and Joss called the next number in her lane.
service centre, footscray
lanes close. 16:30.
assisted: 63. priority: 9. self-service: 0.
reassigned to assisted: 1.
chairs: 24.